John Van Maanen, a professor of management at M.I.T. Sloan who teaches a course named “Leading Organizations,” isn’t so sure it can. “Even today, three-plus decades in, there’s no real definition of it,” he says. “We can make people more conscious of ethical dilemmas in business, of the difficulty of directing people in times of adversity, and the confidence and communication skills necessary to do so. But the idea that such skills can be transmitted so that you can lead anybody at any time, that’s ideologically vacuous.”
“It’s difficult not to be frustrated by the excessive focus on it,” he says, “but it’s become so popular that we apparently can’t teach enough of it.” NyTimes 2015-07-29
As I suspected…
May you have been blessed to be a “Leadership Trainer” (or whatever you call someone who confers “leadership skills” upon the worthy acolyte). I fall back on Karl Popper’s theories about knowledge, that in order for something to be “true” it must be possible to prove it false. In other words, for someone to say they have acquired “leadership skills” it must be at least theoretically possible to prove they have not.
I’m not talking about self-proclaimed leaders. I’m talking about what the marketeers try to sell you as “leadership skills”. It is not possible, of course, in reality, to measure them, because every leader just kind of feels good about himself or herself and starts talking about “we leaders must…” blah blah blah as if they have some kind of objective proof that they have made the grade.
A leader makes decisions. A leader has a vision. A leader makes tough choices. A leader knows how to motivate his foundlings or acolytes or whatever. Any two-bit manager does or does not do all of those things but only the ones who have received medals and certificates start to think there is something special about their own decisions and visions and choices. In my experience, the ones with the most auspicious claims about their “leadership qualities” are the most likely to postpone, delay, consult, and equivocate. They are more likely to slow things down and to impose wasteful bureaucratic procedures on the decision-making process, have more people sign off on decisions, and get angry when people, who actually want to get things done, do things without waiting for the “process” to catch up to them.
They are the kind of people that spend $6 million on consultants who recommend that they sell a provincial asset for $6 million, but don’t recommend that they never again hire idiot consultants to advise them on how to do the job they are paid to do.
Why? Because a single really bad decision can wipe out years of equivocation, evasion, and obfuscation. Why take a chance? You can always, given the vocabulary of leadership training, claim to be a great leader without actually having to prove anything. There is no way to prove that any leadership training has worked. There is no way to prove that a leader is a good leader because if things are going well, they probably would have gone well anyway, and if things are going bad, they could always have gone worse.
But if someone can prove you made a bad decision, the cat is out of the bag. So you hire a consultant. And if it proves to be a bad decision, you say, “oh, but the that’s what the consultant recommended.” They don’t say, “I am the one who chose a stupid consultant.”
People who actually make good, quick decisions– and stick to them– tend to have a more prosaic view of “leadership”: you’re in charge — make decisions. They feel less threatened by others taking some initiative. They don’t feel that other peoples’ accomplishments are a threat to their own status.
[whohit]Leadership Training[/whohit]